On This Day in History: June 18

Charles Darwin

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No one remembers the second-place guy. Alfred Wallace played an important role in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection, but few beyond the biological science community have any idea dafuq he is. I mean, when someone does a dumbass thing that removes them from the gene pool, we don’t call it winning a Wallace Award. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 18, 1858--

Charles definitely got the idea first, because his five-year mission to the Galapagos on the HMS Beagle began when Alfred was only eight years old. Fucking beagles. My next-door neighbor has one and I swear they are genetically designed to be barking machines. Shut the fuck up, Daisy! 

It wasn’t just a voyage to the Galapagos. Leaving in 1831 the Beagle circumnavigated the earth, with much of its survey focused on South America. The Galapagos stands out because Darwin noticed the inhabiting animals were similar from island to island, but slightly different depending on how they had adapted to their environments. 

Fast forward a long fucking time. 

Darwin was working on his book when on June 18, 1858, he received a paper from Wallace that described how that stuff about Noah’s Ark and the earth being only 6,000 years old is total bullshit. Well, not exactly that, but it’s in the ballpark. Wallace had independently come up with how natural selection worked, and Darwin was all oh fuck I need to scoop this asshole and get all the science fame. 

Nah. Charles was actually chill and said hey Alfred this is the confirmation I’ve been hoping for let’s co-publish some shit. The title of their co-authored journal article was a fucking mouthful: “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.” That semi-colon irks me. 

The zoology geeks were mostly “Hmmm . . . interesting.” There was minimal backlash.

Darwin had long suffered ill health, but he was encouraged by fellow scientists and pushed ahead to finish that famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection the following year, which would become one of the most influential books in history. He didn’t specifically say yeah God didn’t create us so stop believing that sky-fairy bullshit. He didn’t discuss human origins explicitly, but he did include enough information about other animal origins that laid out a path for him to write “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” And that’s when some people began saying, “What the fuck, Chuck?”

Some more liberal members of the Church of England said oh cool that’s the way God planned it. Other members of the church were not so thrilled. Of course, cartoonists lampooned the shitshow by drawing Darwin’s head on an ape’s body. Despite illness, Darwin continued his work and published The Descent of Man in 1871, applying his findings to human evolution. In it he spoke of man’s “lowly origin,” and some people, mostly religious types, didn’t like that one bit. 

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